Lawncare season is in full bloom, if the television is any indication. More and more, I’ve been noticing advertisements for riding mowers, hedge trimmers, and all sorts of products targeting the green thumb. But one popular subgenre of these gardening ads have been employing the medium in a way that is undeniably uncanny: commercials for weed killer.

This funny TV commercial for Resolva 24H really illustrates something that they all do: the seemingly “unstoppable” problem of weeds — represented as “relentless little blighters” — or cute little monsters that keep popping back up with malevolence no matter how hard you try to “repress” them using organic methods:

What’s interesting to me is, of course, the uncanny “animation” of plant matter, through the aesthetic conceit of anthropomorphism. They are not just plants — they are tormenters, represented almost like juvenile little children who taunt with their raspberries and child-like antics (as their cartoon “voices” make clear).

But on another level, this cute animation technique in some ways serves to mask or distract us from the identical animation techniques that imbue the pesticide with an equally implicit supernatural agency. Notice how we get “time lapse” photography that can break the laws of time and space to show us a sprayed weed in extremis, dispatched and sent to its grave in a 24 hour period that lasts no longer than a few seconds on screen. We take this for granted as a sort of scientific evidence, but the media is used in a “stop motion” method that is identical to that which grants the “little blighters” life in the first place: animation. Yet the humorous interaction with the human who “battles” the weeds rhetorically distracts us from this appeal; while the “death” sequence featuring the weed is strangely absent of human agency altogether.

Weeds are like monsters: they just won’t die unless you bring a magical force to the rescue.

The poison is doing the work here, not the human. In fact, it’s labor-free.

Lest you think this is just some quirky little ad from down under, I offer another example to illustrate just how widespread these techniques really are, even in commercials that don’t have a single element of “cuteness” to them whatsoever. Here we have a potent ad for Roundup Extended Control weed killer that is sober perhaps to the extreme:

Here weeds are weeds, not cute little creatures (like they are in Roundup’s “weeds won’t play dead, they’ll stay dead” ad campaign), but they do move of their own accord and therefore have a sort of magical “life” and intent all their own. And I dare say it is a relatively pretty one, blooming in a beautiful yellow flange before they are swiftly shot dead. The ad serves to show the power and long-lasting function of the product, but we are given the same pitch as before. We also see the product itself magically split in two (splitting into a sort of doppelganger, or double) before the spray nozzle autonomously does its job on the weeds and the driveway — all set the subtle “Western movie” music — and ending with a stylistic “holstering” of its gun. So again there is no human agency, just an implied magical power, one that literally is delivered by a “gun” that shoots weeds dead.

Now, normally I’d say “good riddance” and anyone who has been frustrated by overgrown patches of weeds on their property will likely be won over by these ads. But what I want to call attention to is the way that “magic” circulates in these ads, often by masking the human agency behind the product, which gives these consumer goods more power than perhaps they ought to be given. And perhaps they also, in the process, mask a vague irresponsibility (or at best suspended critical faculty) regarding the “shotgun” use of chemicals to combat the environment. What we’re really given here are fantasies of wild west gun-slinging to combat the “frontier,” and this reinforces a myth that power should be wielded against the environment through violence. It may very well be a war, and these products may very well be safe weapons, but the fantasy here is that these weeds are inorganic monsters that must be murdered by inorganic means and that’s just, well, weird when we’re talking about organic life to begin with. The organic weed must be reconstructed as an uncanny Other to make this weirdness seem psychologically rational if not normal.

I won’t go on and on about the role of the uncanny in all this, except to say the obvious: death is also everywhere here, and it’s about our death (our own inevitable “battle with the weeds”) as much as it is about burning up the root system of a dandelion with a god-like force.

My favorite Bizarro comic of recent days involves Mr. Peanut — that dapper mascot of Planter’s nuts — in a scenario that makes plain the inherent contradiction of advertisements that employ cartoon mascots to represent the very same products they sell.

Eating our Icons. (Comic by Dan Piraro)

What IS the appeal of these imaginary spokespeanuts and mascots and similar characters in mass advertising that embody the very same product that their companies would have us consume? How does our brain respond to the cognitive dissonance of a cartoon tunafish selling us tunafish to eat? How does the child’s brain process the implied relationship between, say, the character of Mayor McCheese in the Playland and the Quarter Pounder available at the nearby counter at the local McDonald’s restaurant? How do we disavow the “unnatural” and “disturbing” undercurrent to advertising mascots, as expressed by this surprisingly frank commercial for M&M candies from the early 2000s?

I find this advertisement — featuring Patrick Warburton (Seinfeld’s “Putty”) vastly interesting. Beyond the “unnatural” situation — which I’ll focus on in a moment — the setting of this exchange is very telling. It is located in a convenience store that seems a nostalgic throwback to the general “candy stores” of an unidentifiable past. Why does this matter? For one, it situates the story of the ad in the context of economic exchange, but one where no exchange is really happening, save for the actor’s parental scolding and taking away of the candy. The commentary feels realistic in its dark commentary, but the story is still situated in a fantasyland, and it is one which is aligned — dreamily, hazily — with the past for the viewer. The Ms are like “kids in a candyshop” and Warburton plays the adult parent who comes into the shop to scold them.

It matters quite a bit, I think, that the proprietor behind the register is not minding the store, has his back turned when Warburton walks in, and disappears quickly from the image. This allows a situation to transpire that is odd, because normally the clerk would be the one chiding the candy to stop eating the goods he is trying to sell. Instead, we have candy doing nothing at all but hungrily eating more candy, implying a scenario where “the cat is away, so the mice must play” but also providing a parody of the consumer who merely induges his desire to consume without much thought. The M&M characters are not just cannibalistically, but hedonistically indulging themselves in the store, but doing so in a way that is represented as juvenile and childish, allowing the shopper (Warburton) to take on the role of both consumer and parental authority figure, who speaks, ironically, with the voice of reason. It is as though his consumption is valid, but there’s is not an acceptable display of it. The world without consumerism — the theater of the store prior to Warburton’s arrival — is uncivilized, or as animalistic and bestial as it is cannibalistic. The consumer’s exchange — Warburton’s chiding — employs a civilizing effect on the scenario, with the “natural law” (“you don’t eat your own kind…it’s unnatural”) being applied by the consumer’s authority.

This is not the book of Deuteronomy; this is an M&Ms commercial. Commerce is the operative word. The M&M’s try to swap their “colors” but this mutual exchange is not acceptable to the consumer, because it is not a “real” exchange with any symbolic gain. There needs to be some semblance of gain: thus, the consumer takes the candy bags away — getting it all to himself in the process. The popping of an M&M on the way out the door is a symbolic reward, but it also suggests quite clearly: you don’t eat your own kind, but a superior being is free to eat the lower forms…like the juvenile, animalistic, cannibalistic, uncivilized candy. In other words, a hierarchy between parent/child and consumer/product is reaffirmed here and that is the key lesson of the commercial’s “story”: you are not free to gobble up the goods of capitalism — you need to pay for the privilege, and paying makes consumption of ANOTHER KIND perfectly okay.

In other words, it rationalizes the exploitation of the other, in a very self-congratulatory and superior way.

Perhaps I am over-analyzing what amounts to a darkly comedic joke, but often such jokes do relate to unconscious desires, and one of the lessons of the Uncanny is that laughter is just as much a response to the return of the repressed as is a scream. As this commercial and the Bizarro comic up above make clear, there is a cannibalistic undercurrent to the funny and comedic world where animated icons and product spokesmen are normalized. Why else does the Pillsbury Doughboy giggle when we put his brethren children in the oven? Why else does the Michelin Man smile when he asks us to drive on the very rubber flesh that constructs him?

Advertisers employ the literary conceit of personification and the technologies of animation (or costuming) to lend their product an aura of “life” — this, preposterously, gives these icons the implied power “beyond nature” that comes with their status. But it is not so much the living-dead commodities that are embued with this power. It is the manufacturer — the magic machinery of the dough factory, the tire factory — that are attributed with some “secret” power in the process. This is what is meant by “commodity fetishism”; we begin to treat the products of the factory as if they were created by a god or a token of a higher being, instead of something created by the hands of man. Advertising, as Raymond Williams has put it, is a magic system that perpetuates this fetishism of commodities. This may sound like a lot of weight to put onto the back of Mr. Peanut or an M&M candy, but one of the lessons of studying the popular uncanny is that the more unnecessary and empty a consumer good, the more the supernatural is drawn into its marketing and advertising to sell us on its value. If one colored bag of candy is the same as any other, then perhaps the claim that “you don’t eat your own kind” is really betraying a secret fear that this economic system really is a form of self-cannibalism, after all, by trying to disavow it through an imaginary alternative universe, where what we eat is not us, and is not ours, but something magically Other altogether.

I should say up front that one of my articles, on “Eyebombing,” is reprinted from this very site. But PGB’s Uncanny issue includes a diverse mix of variations on the topic, which makes for a compelling if not downright entertaining and thought-provoking read. There are plentiful discussions of robots and cinema (Tintin, Tron, Metropolis, Real Steel), interviews with relevant figures and creators (a new interview with author Tanith Lee is a headliner here, along with interviews with bio-ethicist James Hughes and owners of a museum of automata, Michael & Maria Start), and samples of poetry, research, reviews, humor and more on all things uncanny, from the proverbial uncanny valley to the creepiness of dolls and optical illusions. It even includes a reprint of Freud’s seminal essay on “Das Unheimliche” and a nicely-illustrated version of ETA Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann,” which Freud copiously analyzes in his essay.

A brief alert to let readers of this blog and fans of all things “uncanny” know that my latest book is a large collection of micropoetry — called The Gorelets Omnibus. Aside from hundreds of twisted (and sometimes funny) horror poems, it features a collection of academic articles written about the gorelets project (by critics like Gina Wisker, Lawrence Connolly, Rich Ristow, and David Sandner). One of them, “The Uncanny in your Inbox…” by Dr. David Sandner, delves into my treatment of technology and the gross out, and writes this teaser which I thought I would share here:

“…the uncanny return of the body in all its messy “bodiness” against the ineffective mediation of words, of culture, of technology, of all idealizations that try to move us toward abstraction and away from our smelly, gurgling selves, is characteristic of Arnzen’s work. Not new in horror, of course, it may nonetheless be the kind of horror those in the grip of the promise of new technology and its seeming power and mastery over the world needs to hear.”

In their latest campaign, “Enough. Is. Enough,” JC Penney is running what is, to my mind, a hilarioustelevision commercial, involving a serial montage of consumers shouting for outrageously loud and extended time periods at sales tags and other marketing tricks familiar to us all.

What makes this commercial so great is all the horror film iconography — from the ever-present scream to the use of ambulatory mannikins — to treat its, admittedly, very vague subject. I think my favorite spot involves a woman opening her mailbox and screaming at the endless stream of junk mail that pours out of it, reminiscent of horror films where rats stream out of a sewer. The commercial ranges in references to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to They Live. It is clear to me that the message is about getting rid of fine print and weaselly language in direct mail and sale materials, but judging from the commentary this campaign is generating on facebook, not everyone understands this and most people are simply annoyed by it).

The ad is really a build-up in anticipation of (as of this writing, tonight’s) “reveal” of a special change in the department store giant’s marketing structure. JCP even brashly announces on their facebook page that “On 2.1.12 we’ve got the biggest news in jcp history (Yeah. We’re talking big time here, since we’ve been around for 110 years).” This commercial also has a great tie-in app on its facebook page called “The No Meter!” in which you can literally scream “Noooo!” at the website and the meter will measure your rage and give you a cheeky comment about how potent your screams are.

Scream at JC Penney's No Meter

Whatever JCP has in store for us, I find it fascinating that this advertising campaign appropriates consumer rage at ads into an ad that is a ploy for consumer loyalty. There’s something inherently contradictory here. And it is using the appeal of tropes of the uncanny to sell us on it. But it is using more than just the directorial horror film references that one can easily spot in the commercials. It is using extratextual parlor tricks.

The No Meter is an excellent example of a modern day “fortune teller” machine, an automaton of sorts that invites humans to interact with its mechanism (or in this case, program) in order to “uncannily” respond with an interpretation of their emotions. It plays on the concept that the computer “app” can really “listen” to you and respond. It is, in other words, the domestication of the funhouse parlor trick, the exotic stuff one used to only find on Coney Island, now broadcast in your home office, living room, laptop, and cell phone.

This folksy sort of hokum reminds me of the horror movie ballyhoo of William Castle — who, in his classically campy title, The Tingler, had Vincent Price taunt audiences to “scream for your lives” by yelling at the movie screen in order to kill the monster that was loose in the theater. The gimmick — called Percepto — notoriously included wiring theater seats with joy buzzers that would go off to try to induce screaming.

I’ll be watching the development of this campaign. I can only imagine what it will be like in the shopping mall next time I visit… I suspect that fun-loving folks familiar with this stuff will scream for laughs whenever they walk in or near the store, and for as long as this cultural memory survives, the mall will echo with these goofy “nooooo!” shouts, reminiscent of a scene from Dawn of the Dead.

On the Uncanny . . .

It is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise be innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’…We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.